Which of these American mammals could adapt to eating human food?

The warnings about chocolate arise from the archetypal depressed overweight single woman sitting in bed all day for months on end watching TV while eating bon-bons, and giving every other bon-bon to her toy poodle.

IIRC, the problem is that theobromide, the most notable psychoactive substance in chocolate, is fat soluable and toxic in high concentration. Dogs, unfortunately, are very bad at breaking down or excreting theobromide (one or both, I forget), so if you feed them a lot of chocolate for a long time, theobromide levels build up in their adipose tissue until it reaches toxic levels. Occaisonal exposure though doesn't seem to be a problem.

Still, we don't intentionally feed our dogs chocolate. It's wasted on those little garbage hounds.

 

And if those dogs were free to breed with each other, then they'd revert to pretty much the same animal they descended from. And these dogs don't have widely varied dietary needs. A Chihuahua roughly the same dietary requirements as a Malamute, which has roughly the same dietary requirements as a Husky, which has roughly the same requirements as a wolf. You walk into a pet store and they sell dog food, probably separated into varieties for pups, senior, big, and small, but not Pomeranian food, or Irish Wolfhound food because they all eat the same crap, just in varying amounts.

 

I did ask that, and I got my answer. I was just answering your question about why I specifically mentioned that species within the same genus would not be included.

Also, different species within the same genus CAN have babies together, but most of the time those babies are infertile due to the differing number of chromosomes. An example is the mule, which is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. A female donkey and a male horse's offspring is called a hinny. Another example is a liger, which is the offspring of a male lion and a female tiger. You may have heard of ligers from Napoleon Dynamite (they were the titular character's favorite animal!). The offspring of a female lion and a male tiger is called a tigon.

For my original example, red foxes and gray foxes ARE able to produce babies together, but those babies would not be able to have babies of their own due to the fact that gray foxes have almost twice as many chromosomes as red foxes do. It's the same situation as mules and ligers.

 

See what happens when you sleep with your cousin?

I guess I just don't understand what this has to do with similiar diets.
Why are you obsessing over this? Do you have OCD?

 

More unsupported nonsense. Citations, please. And most people wouldn't need to be told this, but "my cousin in Boise" is not a valid citation.

 

I remember watching Nature, and there was this poor cross-species bird that was fertile but could never find a mate. Why? because the genetically-determined courtship display he tried to use to get one wasn't similar enough to that of either of his parent species.

Life is complicated, and weirder than you'd imagine.

 

I saw a doc about why dogs became man's best friend. They took baby foxes and isolated them from everything but humans. Can you believe it...after three generations of breeding the baby foxes looked like and grew up to look like dogs. (and with no change in genetics)

 

Am I the only one who thinks the whole problem is completely mute? If you use artificial selection or even gene editing to create a new species, everything about it changes. You can’t just dramatically increase something brain without going through thousands of transitional creatures first. Bigger brains require reworking of more than just the brain and the digestive system would be no exception. Big brains take a LOT of energy (about 20% of the calories we use go to the brain.) It’d be impossible to run our brains on a natural vegetarian diet, that type of lifestyle is only viable new because of GMOs, supplements, and our infrastructure that allows mass transport of veggie food that have specifically high levels of certain nutrition.

So increasing the brain size would require a dietary change anyway. Most animals are fairly energy efficient during downtime... not humans. Even just sitting still doing nothing, our complex brains are fuel guzzlers.

If they had special diets, why couldn’t they just do what humans do? Eat what they want and take supplements for the rest. There is a reason veganism didn’t exist fifty years ago, it would have made us very sick. Technology makes more humane food sources feasible.

 

No, they didn’t. You’re referring to a study in the USSR. It wasn’t three generations, it was seven and of course they changed genetics. You don’t have the same genetics as your parents and dogs don’t either. They selected and bred the tame one and ended up with dog-like foxes. The scientists covered their bases, they also selectively bred (from the exact same initial group) for aggression and that part of the population were viscious.


A minor change to what I’m assuming are levels of stress hormones is a far stretch from the type of evolution that needs to happen to rework an animals cardiovasular and digestive system to have five times the caloric demands due to a bigger brain.

 

This is not true. Buddhist veganims (or is it vegetarianism ?) goes way back, and the monks in Japan have developed a cuisine shōjin ryōri around it. Manuals for it date back to at least 1237. I had it at Koyasan, and it was delicious.

That said, making sure you get all the nutrients you need is more difficult when you don't eat any meat.

 

Seven generations is still a short time. I don't know if this is the same thing I saw in the doc or not. The point was they didn't do anything artificial to the foxes, just let them breed. And it was about their looks. They looked like dogs not foxes.

 

It has nothing to do with similar diets. I was just replying to your question about why I bothered with mentioning biological genera.

 

I asked her about this, and she said something like. "If he wants to come volunteer in Weeanusk this summer I can show him an entire office full of citations then show him the insides of both a wolf and a dog to see if he can point out the differences." Then used a string of words I don't know how to translate, but I assume were insulting, then threatened to stab you with a fork.

 

I vote raccoon cause they have hands and are kinda omnivorous.

 

Theobromine and caffeine in cocoa. Has to do with the concentration and the size of the dog. There are plenty of calculators online. Just because a great dane doesn't die from eating a dairymilk doesn't mean we should feed dogs chocolate.

 

This should be the last reply on this thread.

 

@RadioheadMTVBeachHouse93 , only the mods can lock a thread. Even if the question is solved for you, other members can discuss and get useful ideas for their own stories. Just unfollow the thread, I've done it on some of mine once I got the answers I needed.

 

Someone pin this thread. A lot of good sf/f material in here

 

Asked and answered.